My mom’s birthday is on the 29th and every year I vow to not take on any other cakes near it so I can focus on her cake and every year I fail! Long story short I also failed this year because we ended up having her party a week early and a co-worker had requested a cake (months ago) for his wife for the Fri. In the end mom’s cake was plan “C” but I was so happy with how it turned out!

The topper is card stock that my boyfriend cut out for me. The top two tiers are dummies and so I was able to prep them in advance. The top tier is done using the Karen Davies Sugar Flower Mold. It is so easy to use the details are amazing. It’s maybe not that obvious in the photo but the second tier is the crackled fondant effect which I have been wanting to try for some time now.

My mom loves lavender so I wanted to include that as part of the flower arrangement. It and the little purple filler flowers are made from gumpaste and everything else is wafer paper. I treated myself to Stevie Auble’s book “Wafer Paper Cakes: Modern Cake Designs and Techniques for Wafer Paper Flowers and More” and that is where the patterns came from for the anemone, paper roses and rose leaves. My first time trying them all and while they were time consuming to cut out, they were quite easy to assemble.

The bottom tier is the actual cake which was mocha chocolate cake with an Irish coffee cheesecake center, chocolate ganache in between the layers and then all iced with SMBC. The cake was a hit with everyone and the biggest complement was that at first mom didn’t even realize that I made the flowers, she thought I had bought them.